This weekend we replaced the battery on the Kymco People 50 motor scooter that Peter rides to work. With a new $50 battery in place, he zoomed off this morning in high spirits, reporting back that the odometer hit 15,000 miles! Seems a good time to take a look at the overall impact of this purchase.

Peter gets 90 miles per gallon of gas when he rides the scooter to work (10.5 miles round trip). He gets 27 mpg when driving the car. We’ve saved half the cost of the scooter in gas savings.

The burning of one gallon of gas (with 10% ethanol) produces 18.95 lbs of carbon. Driving the scooter 15,000 miles has produced 3,148 lbs of carbon (or 1.58 short tons). Driving the car the same number of miles produced 10,152 lbs of carbon (5.08 short tons). So driving the scooter prevented 6,998 lbs of carbon (3.5 tons) from entering the atmosphere.

And the scooter is fun!

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About thinkofitasanadventure

We are a 50-something couple living in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis. We attended a sustainability conference at our local high school in November 2010, with keynote speaker Richard Heinberg from the Post Carbon Institute. What we heard shocked us deeply. We finally understood the need to transition away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible. We immediately began to change the way we live. We joined together with other folks in our neighborhood to learn more, to do more and to have fun doing it! We're part of Transition Longfellow. We're choosing to change now and to "think of it as an adventure." If you are on this journey too, we'd love to hear from you.